


Wall of Sound

by x_los



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Music, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Alternate Universe - Teachers, Band Fic, First Impressions, First Meetings, M/M, Modern Era, Music, Musicians
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 18:10:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6434932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Avon is a very successful record producer, manager and sound engineer in the well-trod 'evil genius' vein. Blake is a secondary school history teacher who plays pub gigs for fun. Art rock and god-awful first impressions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wall of Sound

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by Elviaprose.

The auditorium was both empty and in a state of considerable disrepair. In fact the building itself had been unlocked: no one had let Blake in, probably because no one appeared to _work_ here in any capacity. Blake gave the unpeopled, largely unlit space a wry shrug, because actually, he wasn't all that surprised.

Vila had set this gig up, in his 'I've got a friend who's got a friend' sort of way. When Vila pulled strings, the results tended to either be ridiculously successful or an absolute shambles. For the former, see Jenna's last birthday. It had been held in the Museum of London after hours, because Vila knew a bloke on the staff. The lot of them had drunkenly run around the exhibits. They’d made Blake give them a somewhat confused, swear-heavy and ridiculously-Marxist-even-for-Blake tour, and at the end of the night they’d all ended up having a group sing-along in the mock-up Celtic Hut. For the _latter_ , see Gan's last birthday, held in what had to have been the most depressing pub in the country. Free drinks didn't count for much if said drinks were all Strongbow.

Blake had gotten pretty good at heading off events he sensed were going to fall in the latter category, but inevitably a few such incidents slipped through the net. These could test Blake's patience, but he didn't _really_ mind. As Chesterton had said of Micawber (and Vila, bless him, was a Londoner of that long and venerable tradition), “the very people who are most irritating in small business circumstances are often the people who are most delightful in long stretches of experience of life. It is just the man who is maddening when he is ordering a cutlet or arranging an appointment who is probably the man in whose company it is worthwhile to journey steadily towards the grave.”

Making a mental tick mark in Vila's 'cons' column (it was a long running tab Blake didn't think he'd ever have occasion to settle), Blake took his guitar out of its case and gave it an experimental strum. He raised his eyebrow at the way the sound reverberated in the hall. That really wasn't bad at all. He could use an hour's practice somewhere quiet with decent acoustics. It would help him unwind, and if someone came in after all, he'd simply explain the misunderstanding (and possibly take any requests).

Blake worked through a whole set, and then simply played around. But he had marking to get on with, and, reluctantly, he rolled his shoulders and set down his guitar.

Sliding it into the case, Blake froze when, from the back of the hall, he heard a series of slow, sarcastic claps.

“Do you know 'Wonderwall'?” a nasal voice Blake didn't recognize called from the back. Blake classed the tone as 'witheringly ironic'.

“Is this a Secret Cinema _Citizen Kane_ performance no one told me about?” Blake said without looking up as he finished putting his guitar away and stood, letting his voice project without raising it.

“It would be better attended if it were,” the heckler answered him. “People in London want to come to those.”

Blake snorted. “People in London want to vote for Boris Johnson.”

“It's not much of an argument for people, I'll admit,” the heckler (who Blake still couldn't see) allowed.

Blake dismounted the stage and walked towards him, incidentally. Mostly, Blake was walking towards the door. The unknown man, apparently sitting in the darkness, was between him and it. Blake glanced about, looking for the source of the voice, and stopped when he saw a man sitting in the shadows. Blake only spotted him because the man in question was rather pale.

“Do you know,” the man, still seated, inquired, “why no one came tonight?”

Blake shrugged. “I imagine it has something to do with my friend Vila having given me the wrong address, the wrong date, the wrong meridiem, or any combination thereof. It wouldn’t be the first time.” (It wouldn’t even be the _eighth_ time: knowing Vila Restal was a very special experience.)

The man stood and walked towards Blake, who waited with polite interest. When he'd stepped into the strip of light extending out into the auditorium from the lobby, Blake noted that the man was dark haired, good looking, and had an insufferable sort of expression on his face.

“No, that shouldn't have stopped people from coming. If, for example, you'd announced this event properly on social media and promoted it even basically adequately, you wouldn't have wasted your evening playing to an empty house. Then again, your shows should be managed by a professional, not held hostage to the vagaries of incompetent friends. From what I can tell, your marketing is unpardonable, in that it is almost non-existent, and where it _does_ exist, it's execrable. Oh," he smiled glitteringly, “and _well done_ on playing for no one—only a fool gives away his wares.”

Blake gave the unknown man a look. “Are you _quite_ finished?”

The man shook his head. “No, not quite. If you're serious about this, Roj Blake, you'll let me manage and produce you. You won't complain about the ticket prices I set, the rider I compose, or the merchandizing choices I make. You'll stick to singing—it's what you're good at. You will sit back and let me handle everything. It's what I do, and I,” he smiled thinly, “am very good at it.”

He seemed to expect a rather different reaction than Blake just chuckling incredulously.

“Thank you for that... kind offer, Mister Spector,” Blake said, “but if it's all the same to you, I'd rather not.”

The man managed, simultaneously, to look blank and angry. “It isn’t. _Why?_ ”

“Well, I’m flattered, I’m sure,” Blake said, his tone indicating that no, he wasn’t, “but it all sounds rather Faustian, doesn’t it? _If_ Mephistopheles was a strange man spouting dialogue out of _Wall Street_ and practically threatening people with what sound like rather inequitable terms,” Blake allowed. “I’m not very interested in selling my soul, as it happens. Certainly not in exchange for a small heap of seven-pound concert tickets.”

“They wouldn’t be seven pounds when I got through with them,” the man corrected him, seemingly reflexively.

Blake tutted and raised his eyebrow. “Dare we ascend to the dizzying heights of _nine_ quid? And by the way, while I'm _not_ an expert, I did get an A on my law A-level. It's been a while, but I do know a stupid contract when someone hisses the general terms at me. I'll get a bloody Youtube account or something,” Blake waved his hand, “or I don't know, a Twitter.”

“Fine,” the man sneered, “see how _that_ works for you.”

He seemed annoyed—possibly furious. Or at least he turned on his heel and walked away from Blake, stiffly and at surprising speed (which, Blake supposed, indicated the presence of another entrance to the building he hadn't known about). Blake had seen a disgruntled stork do something similar once in _The Living Planet_. In his head, he heard David Attenborough narration: “the White-Throated Git, though aggressive, is actually quite a nervous creature when startled”, etc.

“Now who the hell was that?” Blake murmured to himself under his breath. “And how the hell did he know I'd _be_ here?”

***

In the coming months, Blake stuck to his usual round of pub gigs. This was, after all, just a hobby for him. His day job was teaching secondary school history in a particularly challenging district. Tough, but worth it. Blake had worked hard with his students, helping them use the system to their benefit to attain grants and support. In the last three years, several of his lot had gotten into Russell Group universities—one of them had even been admitted into his own former college at Oxford. Most of these would be the first children from their families to attain degrees. It was work Blake was proud of, though he and his co-workers all felt the austerity cuts and the threat of ill-conceived Academy transformations lowering over them.

But though music was only Blake’s hobby, he didn't feel comfortable minimizing how important it was to him. 'Just' was all wrong, really. Blake was _passionate_ about music: it engaged him emotionally and intellectually, he thought through and with it. He thought of his personal past in terms of the music he associated with it, and music history was a pet subject of his. Blake worked hard at composition, at his playing, at his vocals—he felt music in part defined him, as everything he really cared about did. Blake had put a lot of himself into the album he'd produced, and if he'd largely done it for himself and his friends (several of whom were also musicians working on a similar scale) and made little effort to move copies (he offered a few CDs at his shows, when he remembered to—he'd never really gotten around to Establishing a Social Media Presence), what was it to anyone else?

Really Blake enjoyed playing live the best—feeling out an audience, letting his set list and the particular versions of his own and others' material he chose to play sway a crowd like a good argument. He could hold an audience like he could hold a class. He enjoyed doing it.

But given that the pubs Blake played at weren't vast, he could hardly fail to notice that The Man From the Empty Auditorium (it sounded, to Blake, a little like a horror film title) came to a few more of his gigs. Though these ones were, thankfully (and less embarrassingly), somewhat better attended—it turned out Vila _had_ told him the wrong date after all, due to some 'cousin of a friend' telephone game chain of misapprehensions it hurt Blake to think too much about. God knew how his heckler had sussed it.

The Man From the Empty Auditorium would come, glare at Blake for the duration of a set, nurse a single gin and tonic for the entire night (thus annoying the bar staff) and leave. Blake got his name off of an irate waitress who'd run his credit card (it seemed, the waitress said with a roll of her eyes, that he ‘didn’t carry cash’): Kerr Avon.

Blake decided to google him—best to make sure Kerr Avon wasn't wanted for stalking and murdering a series of lounge singers in Reno or something of the sort. As it happened, he wasn't, but what Blake _was_ able to discover about Avon just confused him further.

***

Eventually, Avon cornered him in a car park.

“All right,” he said, glaring at Blake. “Have it your way. Let's start over.”

“There isn't really anything to discuss,” Blake said mildly, unloading his guitar into the back of his battered Citroen. Only two cars remained in the lot, Blake having left the pub at the end of the night and Avon having apparently waited for him to finish up. Of course Avon drove a BMW—of course he did.

“Oh but there is,” Avon said grimly, as though it pained him to admit it. “You ought to let me manage you.”

“I've heard that before,” Blake said, rolling his eyes. “Exactly _why_ do you come down here? I've seen you—it must be three times now.”

Something in Avon's expression told Blake he'd gotten the number wrong, but it didn't seem worth investigating.

“You are, as you implied, and as my good friend in the industry Wikipedia confirms, something of a 'hit-maker',” Blake said, pronouncing the term a little like 'tin-pot dictator'. “You’re more successful than I really want to know about, and if you’re interested in _my_ work,” Blake said _that_ somewhat sarcastically, because stranger things had happened, but these were largely reported on by tabloids and then seized on by respectable papers in due course, “you certainly have a unique way of showing it.  So, why _do_ any of this?” Blake gestured, closing the boot of his car with a perhaps unnecessarily violent slam.

Blake's breath steamed out white before his face. It was November. Avon, in a long, expensive-looking camel hair coat, was better protected against the night air, but the way he held himself—rigid—suggested to Blake that he felt the cold more than Blake did.

Blake thought that under the bulky overcoat and the discreetly-padded, equally expensive-looking suit-jackets, Avon might actually have a rather slender frame. He looked the type to catch a cold by loitering near water for ten minutes together. He probably shouldn't be standing around out here, but standing around out here he was.

“I think you're capable of making me a great deal of money,” Avon said flatly.

“Interesting,” Blake returned calmly. That _had_ been the only logical explanation, far-fetched as he thought it. Yet strangely, the way Avon said it tipped off Blake’s bullshit detectors, which had been finely honed by years of dealing with students’ excuses and directives from a Tory minister of education.

“But then, so is anyone you might pick up out of the BRIT School,” Blake pointed out. “Just check that they've graduated to ensure that the police don’t think you go in for bothering minors, and there you have it. You know how all this works—if you want an Ellie Goulding, you can manufacture one in a month. And besides, as I suggested, you already _have_ a lot of money.”

Avon looked furtive, but then swallowed. Quite hard. "I love your music," he said quietly.

Blake flat-out laughed at him, and Avon suddenly looked _furious_.

“No. Don't do that to me again. I _love_ your music, Blake,” Avon repeated, tilting his chin up like he was daring Blake to call him a liar. “When I am _absolutely_ certain no one can hear me, I hum the one about the burning house, which, while we are here, could use a better title, in the shower. I rewrote a pop song to sound more like one of yours last week—I think, technically, that I may owe you royalties. I’d apologize, but it wasn’t one of your better ones. Whereas I hear “Clay,'” which is absolutely and intolerably perfect, in my fucking dreams. The lyrics are clever. They are more than clever. I know it’s coming, now, but every time what I initially assumed was background distortion born of poor equipment rises and becomes the melody, I still catch my breath.”

Avon continued to glare him, as intensely as he had glared at Blake during Blake’s sets. That look had made Blake feel like he needed to work harder, play better: like he needed to rip his heart out to win the crowd, if that was what it took. It had felt a little like it was this man, more than anyone, who he’d been playing to and for.

Avon took a step closer to Blake, and Blake felt his own breath catch. “I tried to have sex with someone else while “Hangmen” played, actually,” Avon continued, holding Blake’s gaze. “Between the bassline and your voice, it was _very_ good. And not at all what I wanted. Because what I want is, apparently, you.”

He gave Blake a small, ironic smile and continued. “I want you enough to make me graceless and stupid and verging-on-insane, when anyone in the industry will tell you that I am nothing if not professional. I’m a byword for it. Or at least, I was. I can’t quite help it. You’re brilliant. No,” Avon shook his head at Blake’s expression of surprise, “I mean it. You are _career-definingly_ brilliant. When your album is properly produced and distributed, I will stake my considerable reputation on its critical success. I expect it will enjoy reasonable commercial success as well, but it might take a sophomore album to convince people. But you will convince them, Blake. _You_ are the one I’m going to be remembered for, and I believe you actually deserve it. I want everyone to love you, and I don't want you to love anyone but me.”

Avon glanced away. “I understand if you want to be managed by someone else. I—would arrange that for you. But you and I are going on a date,” Avon squared his jaw, “because I don't think there's anything else we _can_ do, do you?”

Blake stared at him for a moment. “What if I don't like you?” he asked, almost bewildered.

Avon gave him a desperate look, which condensed into determination in another instant.

“I can make you like me,” Avon said. “I made Britain like Siobhan Sheppare, and she can't carry a tune with the aid of a forklift. Besides, I—” he swallowed.

“I'm not sure it's possible,” Avon continued. “That I could—like you as much as I do. And that you really wouldn't like me, if you thought about it. If you were prepared to give it, perhaps—”

Blake found himself kissing the strange, deeply over-dramatic, delightfully bitchy and _very_ handsome man fairly desperately. Blake hadn’t known he was going to do it, but once he’d started he didn’t really understand how one _stopped_ kissing Avon.

He supposed that answered that.

“I don't want to be _Ellie Goulding_ ,” Blake said into Avon’s mouth.

“No,” Avon gasped, “no, of course not. More of a male Kate Bush with a sort of Peter Gabriel turn and a—yes, the neck, more of the neck, mm, it's hideously cliché to say Joni, but—”

“I _love_ Joni,” Blake agreed.

“Yes, exactly, she's transcendent, it’s a cliché for a reason, mm, Blake—what else do you like?”

They conducted a bizarre, passionate, slightly surreal conversation about music they loved (King Crimson and Appalachian folk and the bitter, nimble backhand of Nina Simone—it seemed like a conversation they never could quite finish) and ways they’d like to touch as they made out in a car park like teenagers.

“We should get you out of this cold,” Blake murmured.

Avon nodded. “Come home with me,” he suggested, sounding simultaneously sure of Blake and almost frantic.

“All right,” Blake said into his hair, wondering what the hell he was thinking, and when it had become impossible to imagine doing anything else. “I’m not, er, sleeping with you for a record deal. Or anything.”

Avon just laughed at that. “Well now. I didn’t offer you one to trick you into bed, so I suppose we are even.”

***

“How did you know where that first concert was?” Blake muttered into Avon’s collar-bone. It was that or ask the other question immediately weighing on his mind (‘why do you have a bed the size of Dorset?’).

“A very impressed friend gave me your album,” Avon said, stretching against him. “She stumbled upon it by chance. Well, she’d have to, given your distribution methods. I was only professionally obsessed with you at the time. Still, I did check in on your Facebook fairly frequently as I tried to decide how to approach and market you. At the time, I didn’t think there’d be any problem there. I assumed winning you over would be easy,” Avon said with a snort of hindsight. “You happened to mention you were performing, so I thought I’d drop in.”

“Avon,” Blake asked, his eyes narrowing in confusion, “did you sit and watch me for a full hour in the dark without telling me?”

Avon shifted. “I—didn’t intend to. At first I thought it would be awkward to call attention to myself. Then I thought I’d get a better sense of your work, listening to it like that. And then I—started to enjoy watching you for reasons that were only partly professional.”

“You,” Blake breathed into Avon’s hair, disturbing it slightly, “are so weird, Avon. Why do I like how _weird_ you are? Why did I just _come home_ with you when we haven’t even been on a date? I’ve never done that. Why am I _mental_ about you?”

Avon nodded. “I sympathise with your concerns, but frankly I’ve given up asking that sort of thing when it comes to you. I don’t expect the effect dissipates, either. As it happens, it’s only gotten worse. I’m thinking frankly appalling things about how long I’ll have to wait to ask you to move in. Essentially,” he drawled, “you and I are fucked.”

“Well,” Blake murmured, “one of us is.” He allowed his voice to drop into an insinuating register that, apparently, made Avon shiver slightly—now _that_ was very nice. Blake thought he could get used to that

“Oh you want to fix that, do you?” Avon asked, idly stroking his arm.

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“That,” Avon said with a yawn, “is what mornings are for.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> * I left the Secret Cinema joke in because it's something I feel like two people with these interests living in London would say and get, but it _is_ a bit weird. Essentially, Secret Cinema is a performance group that does pop-up, immersive, semi-theatrical showings of old films. A flatmate of mine was a dancer for their _Little Shop_ the other week, I think, and another did carpentry for their sets a while back. Secret Cinema operates on a sort of short-notice/low-information, surprise-predicated, commercial performance art basis, and these events are popular/trendy (their Star Wars screenings did very well, they're often in the news, etc.). Essentially, Blake's saying this could be their performance of the famous Bad Opera scene from _Citizen Kane_ , complete with One Man In The Dark!Clapping.
> 
> * I feel like the music market alluded to in this fic is a bit 80s, with room for something Genesis-y, but eh, Blake's not Meghan Trainor and Avon's not Dr. Luke, so it suits them better. Here's hoping for some expansion on the art rock front--it's a changing climate, it's not impossible (though probably unlikely--Blake would so come out via British!Merge or British!Kill Rock Stars or the like, rather than, as here, essentially debuting via Capitol).
> 
> * I don't know how often management and production responsibilities overlap in quite this way. It seems like: sometimes. Guys: I don't know that much about this field. I assume Blake gets a good entertainment lawyer though, because he's not insane, and Avon both understands and is like 'oh, so you need someone to protect you from ME??' And Blake's like '...you ...gave me her number?' And Avon's like 'I KNOW I DID!!'


End file.
